Whether you are one of our undergraduate minors or a potential graduate student this site should offer answers to many of your questions. The Women Studies Program at Oregon State University wasfounded in 1972 and currently has three full time faculty and morethan 50 affiliated Program faculty.
Women Studies is the multidisciplinary study of women's lives and experiences. Course work explores women's realities in such areas as the political and social sciences, health, psychology, history, literature, and the arts. Women Studies programs grew out of the women's movement. Such programs involve understandings of sexist discrimination in society and a need to celebrate women's strengths, contributions, and forms of resistance. Grounded in this feminist knowledge, Women Studies is constantly growing and changing in order to understand and affirm the role that issues of race, social class, age, ability, appearance, and sexual identity play in women's everyday lives. We hope you will find Women Studies to be academically challenging and personally rewarding. It is our goal to provide a program that is intellectually sound and vocationally useful, as well as one that encourages personal growth.
You have the opportunity to study in a large, well-developed program and yet one that emphasizes informality, warmth, and personal concern for you and your educational goals. Course offerings are varied and representative of current issues and research. The OSU program stresses your need for multidiciplinary viewpoints and knowledge. It encourages independent thinking and self-directed study in a supportive, yet intellectually challenging, learning environment.
Women Studies at OSU offers a minor and certificate at the undergraduate level, primary and secondary areas in the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies, and a graduate minor. We sponsor the annual Feminist Film Festival and co-sponsor a variety of speakers and events each academic year that complement students' learning experiences in the classroom.
Thanks for visiting our web site. Please feel free to contact us if you have further questions.
Susan M. Shaw, Director.